IN NIGATA, THERE are two seasons. One is marked by short days when the air feels like a glass of ice water. The other season has days that can start at 3:30 and last until after nine. Cleansing breaths called spring and autumn each last about ten days. These transitions are identified by the bubble-gum pink of the cherry blossoms in May and the poster paint red of the maples in November. In between is summer.

In Japan I looked at things. One August Sunday as I stared out the window of the local Mr. Donut, my hands idled between an iced tea and a letter to a friend back home. One of the friends who had impressed me with letters from studies abroad in London, Madrid, or Sydney. Greetings from Niigata, mine began. At work, my female high school students turned in journals addressed as letters to me, their sole reader. They introduced me to the Japanese custom of including something pleasant about the season when writing correspondence. What pleasantries could I include about Niigata’s summer? By June I began wearing a T-shirt on my three-block walk to work with a blouse and towel in tow. My coworker’s grandfather had sweated through the Hawaiian rainforests, the Kyoto Basin in July, subtropical Okinawan villages, and nowhere, he assured me, was the air as oppressively wet as in our little cranny between the Echigo mountain range and the Sea of Japan. I was sweating through the middle of a one-year teaching contract while my friends in Michigan were starting graduate school, getting promoted, getting married.

Outside, amid hats and handheld fans was James, the welcome wagon for new foreigners. He waved, and then joined me inside. I’d ordered pizza with James and his girlfriend on Christmas, which didn’t seem like Christmas at all. He had translated through my first cell phone purchase, assuring me the tiny thing would reach my parents. James had also taken me to the first Shinto shrine I ever visited. After growing up in Kenya under circumstances too unpleasant to mention in Japan, he now shrugged off discrimination with a wide smile. I knew this because one of the Canadian teachers had whispered it to me. She also said James had won the local marathon each time he felt like running it and this year it would be part of his training for the Tokyo race.

“You should do the half,” he said. When I told him the 10K he’d talked me into in April had nearly killed me, that I couldn’t possibly go any farther, he laughed and placed encouraging hands on my shoulders. “Take a deep breath, Kris-tine, and just try.”

I’d always been a runner, but back in the quiet gray mornings of November, as I tried to run along the Shinano River, I turned back in the face of snow, ice, and bitter winds. I had presumed that first month I would see plenty of foreigners on the trail, but I had been wrong. All the other gaijin were at the gym, a room filled with computerized machines I couldn’t read. It was lined with window walls that revealed an aerobics room on one side, a pool on another, a lobby on the west side where women in tennis shirts bowed and repeated arigato gozaimashita, and on the east wall, one’s own reflection. From the treadmill in front of those windows, I would look past myself, past the snow as it fell into the canyons between office buildings, and see a road outside in the imaginary sun.

This visual escaping technique worked until someone appeared next to me in the glass, distracting me from my long-distance gaze. He stood more than six feet, taller than any other Japanese man I had noticed in those first two months. Something about him reminded me of boys I liked in high school ¾ either his relaxed posture or his attempt at eye contact. Looking back at his reflection was like trying on 3-D glasses: he appeared in focus, within reach. He adjusted his speed until our steps were synchronized. Like a metronome, my bronze ponytail its pendulum, our feet kept time so we could concentrate on our breathing. 

Then we laughed, and broke our stride as the aerobics instructor in neon shorts chanted, “Woosh, hey! Gambatte gambatte! Woosh…” Do your best, he told the class.

In the lobby, as I rehearsed my response to the bowing women, behind me I heard in English, “You should join.” His hair was messy. A white towel circled his neck.

“Who?” I asked.

He laughed. “The class.”

Hiroshi was a painter. He studied many faces, but not mine. He was interested in my round gaijin body. I know this because he announced it to my face on one of those frigid February mornings. Then he left my apartment, and I sprung from the futon to the mirror, where I tweezed my eyebrows into two thin apostrophes. That day I set out to buy the brands of makeup painted on the lids and lips of TV models, if only to see how many male gazes I could draw without my body.

In April Hiro moved to Tokyo; I stopped going to the gym and returned to the river. Without snow and with the help of language lessons, I could see on those morning walks the way girls on bikes leaned toward each other as they giggled about boys, the twisting in the faces of some strangers as I marched past, the indecision of the heron as he stared into the water below. I watched cherry blossom petals eddy into the Shinano and wanted to chase them out to the sea and across to Seoul or Beijing if only to see where they’d end up, if they could stay afloat.

While my family swam in and watched fireworks over Lake Michigan, I celebrated Independence Day with a haircut. I watched the mirror as locks and wisps and strands fell to the tile, until the scissors stopped an inch from my scalp. I told the women at school that the humidity made my hair’s weight unbearable, but I wanted to unveil my face. My face, I discovered, was quite ordinary, with eyes set deep behind chubby cheeks that either displayed freckles like splotches on a canvas or burned red. But I’m not here to tell you about my face. I’m talking about my body and what I let it do to my mind.

By September, I had forgotten those winter days when everything along the river had seemed new, waiting to be uncovered. I registered for the half-marathon. Now my mornings had purpose. If I was to run thirteen miles by October, I had to get to know the river, foot by foot. On one particular morning three weeks before the race, I ran slightly longer than I had during that rainy10K the previous spring: this was a seven-mile morning. Though I called them miles, I actually measured by time, and by landmarks along the Shinano. But I hadn’t traveled this far before.

I’d start my training runs covering familiar ground, going north toward the sea until the fishing boats became pungent and the wide-eyed fishermen scared me south. South below the high rises on the west bank of the river, opposite the billboards red and shouting KIRIN LAGER, SONY, NIISAN. I’d continue against the flow, past the bridge that led back to my apartment, past the modern glass theater, the towering concrete high school, and hope that this time none of the boys in their oversized navy blue sport coats would shout English words at me ¾ Hey, you! Hello! Today is Monday ¾ before they cackled and muttered in Japanese. This could happen on any day but Sunday, the only day there was no school and the day I clocked the greatest mileage.

As I moved south, the buildings would become shorter and sparser. Ranch houses fronted by dense gardens would remind me of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station and the three million commuters and tourists and families and lovers that occupy it in one day’s time. I would remember that there’s room for everything to grow and change and move through life at any number of paces. Then the asphalt would turn to a narrow dirt trail in the grass. The terrain would feel uneven. At the end of my field of vision, a large steel floodgate would stand between the central Niigata I knew and its surrounding areas. As I’d get closer to it, I would see where the river split into a Y, each branch of it wide and lined with more trees than buildings or neon billboards. I’d hear each foot hit the earth and feel the sweat saturate the black bandana that covered all of my hair until my face and neck would pour out excess water and salt and other things I would no longer need. My T-shirt would turn from the color of dust to charcoal. I would stop under a tree near the gate, double over, and listen to my lungs heave and wheeze before heading back.

All of that would take place between two and a half and four miles of running, but such a degree of perspiration can happen at a strolling pace in the thick of Niigata’s summer. But winter is winter anywhere whether it’s fifty degrees above or below zero, whether the sun shines or it doesn’t, whether rain or snow falls; it’s not as nice as it could be and you hate settling for less than the best life has to give you. But then it warms up, and you expect the best. You go out of your way to surround yourself with who and what you prefer because this is when you’re supposed to make memories. For me, this is when I remember too much and most want to be home. Send me anywhere in winter, but summer is another matter. Summer is when beaches and riversides fill with families and lovers gazing at each other, the water, the migrant birds, or one last sunset as though seeing for the first time.

Most of my pictures of the Shinano are from a January morning when its banks and bridges and branches were covered in snow. One monochrome photo features a sign under a white garland announcing in English, “Shinano River” and in Japanese that “river,” or kawa, is represented by three vertical lines. The middle line is shorter on top and bottom than the outside lines, like the spine on a torso with perfect posture. A two-lane highway was what I saw on the sign. This particular river, one of my students told me, is the longest in Japan. It begins near Nagano in the southwest and runs through the heart of the main island until it merges with the Abukuma River in Niigata, where it offers everything it has to the sea.

At first I couldn’t wait until each winter Sunday, when I would sit on the tatami floors of the Canadian teachers’ apartments for hours, talking quickly (and with incorrect grammar) in English about home or the demands of their managers and my students’ mothers. As we complained, we would consume shortbread, potato chips, Coca-Cola, reruns of The Simpsons, or Audrey Hepburn movies. We would listen to Holly Golightly sing “Moon River” to Paul and watched him chase her until he warned her that if she didn’t slow down, she would run into herself. I would wonder how one woman could possess so much charm. Was it her hat collection, her naïve smile, the way she held her cigarette? Between her mouth, throat, and lungs, a flame could be sparked, spread, and smoldered. A self-contained unit. I had never allowed myself to smoke. Doing so, I thought, would have made physical activity too difficult. But as I watched her, I considered teaching myself to smoke, not just for looks, but to make a daily commitment to deep breathing.

Hiro smoked. Some winter mornings I would wake up and smell his smoky laughter in my hair. In the coffee shop, I would watch his fingers deliver another ten-second delay to his mouth while he composed his next sentence. Just as Truman Capote’s Paul warned Holly to stop running, through the voice of a fictional character in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand reasoned that “[w]hen a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind ¾ and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.” The smoke would rise from Hiro’s cigarette, above his black skullcap, and into the American pop music. Then he would tell me he wanted to live in California, to be a beatnik. That was as intimate as our conversations would ever become. And there, in the coffee shop, he would laugh at his own dreams ¾ coughing out short, hard puffs ¾ while his father lay dying a mile away. I should have echoed Hiro’s laughter and encouraged him, but he had already escaped. He ran away from his life as a salaryman (preparing to take over his father’s company in Niigata) to Australia, where he taught Japanese until his mother called to tell him it was all over.

Without family, and with not much of your face, hair, or mind left to speak of after singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” six times a day, all you have is your body. So you pay attention to it. Soreness in your armpits when you lift the two-year-old students tells you to keep your arms closer to your foundation on the trail. Burning on the bottom of your feet means you have to wear slippers indoors instead of just socks, even if your size ten heels hang off the edge. Tight calves, creaking joints, and that twitching in your quadriceps call for more stretches and longer baths. You’ve got to get used to sitting in that bathtub. The shooting pains through your neck, you figure, are the result of short, hard steps. So you start to glide.

The animated characters on the candy boxes you used to buy at the conbini aren’t cute anymore. You stop ordering pizza, despite the novelty of the toppings: mayonnaise, scallops, shrimp. And the plum, lychee, and lime flavored liquors lose their appeal. You stop drinking spicy beer and eating tempura after work with the teachers from the adult schools.

“When can you come out and play again?” one of them asks in mid-September.

“Three more weeks.”

Life had become easier that summer. If my body was up for a challenge, I thought, my mind must be, too. I woke up to the local radio station, eavesdropped all day at work and around town before watching newscasts, cartoons, soap operas, and then fell asleep with my vocabulary books. “Kristi-san, you are so improved since last month,” my Japanese teacher said during my Labor Day lesson. As if to reward me, she spoke English at the end, just as I had entered my zone and all my sensory messages were transmitted in Japanese. It was always after she’d pushed me further that the curtains were pulled back from signs and faces and I almost believed her when she said, “I think you don’t need me anymore.”

The speech of women and children, I was told, would be easier to understand. This proved true, since I had little exposure to men. But during those first few winter months, Hiro, like James, had translated the code of a world shrouded with subtlety. “To-ma-re,” he sounded out, pointing to the symbols on the pavement under a red hexagonal sign that didn’t say stop.

I ran deeper into neighborhoods of earth-toned houses on the Sunday two weeks before the race, as the trail switched back between my arm of the Shinano and a second outlet to the sea. When I turned back at what I guessed was four and a half miles, a haze blanketed the east side of town, hiding everything beyond the river bank. The second half of that run was sluggish and impossible. I noticed nothing except that my ankles cracked, my knees tightened up, and the sweat came out as a slime that ran into my eyes, between my fingers, and down the backs of my legs. I wheezed and coughed and thought of nothing but withdrawing from the race.

Because of its position at the mouth of the Shinano River and the foot of the Japan Alps, Niigata boasts some of the purest water in the country. The purity of the water has brought the notoriety of superior rice, which of course yields superior sake. The clean water and the humidity, I assume, are responsible for Niigata’s reputation as home of women with superior beauty. Men I met outside of the region rarely hesitated to note the perfect skin of “snow country” women. Rather than trying to comprehend this phenomenon, I likened it to something American: the Beach Boys’ preference for girls with sun-kissed California skin.

Snow country women were thin, graceful, composed. I had never worried about thinness before; my body had always been something sturdy and functional that transported me or allowed me to enjoy basketball, mountain hikes, and running. It was too much physical activity, my mother warned me on the way to high school one morning, that would distract me from my own thoughts, exhaust me until I wouldn’t know what I felt. “You’re running away from your problems,” she said. How could fitness be dangerous? I wondered. And who wants to deal with their parents’ custody battle or their grandmother’s death when they could perfect their reverse lay-up or clinch that six-minute mile? Surely my body was more powerful than my mind. But in the presence of those high school boys, and then the larger and less accessible versions of them in college, my body, as well as my face, had often been something to hide. In Japan they could not be ignored. As my ten-year-old students began their unit on physical appearances, I would hear: “I have black hair and black eyes and a small nose. I am short. Kristi-Sensei has blue eyes and brown hair and a big nose. She is tall.”

The following Saturday, eight days before the race, I received an offer to renew my contract. Another year?  I held my breath as I pictured my students and their mothers and grandmothers saying I couldn’t leave yet because their English wasn’t good enough to write letters to me. I sighed. Then I imagined staying, and many students drifting away to college or piano lessons or other after-school commitments. New students would gradually take their place, and then, eventually, a new teacher would take my place. They would grab her hand and ask for piggyback rides or the name of her favorite pop singer as soon as my bullet train to the airport shot out of sight, its breeze drying their tears.

I had always run before making a decision, to sweat out my doubts, to let my feet keep time while my breath played over it in half-notes, as my dad had taught me on our weekend trips to the track. With your tongue pressed behind your front teeth, you inhale through your nose for two steps, then open your mouth and let everything out for two more. With a steady rhythm, you can slow down and rearrange your thoughts.

That mid-September Sunday my feet met the trail again. It was a day a Midwestern meteorologist might call mostly sunny and mild. Gliding over the bridge, past the theater and the empty school, weaving between bikes, I whirred past the floodgate without losing my breath. This was the ten-mile day, and the extra half mile ended too soon, at a tomare sign in a subdivision I wanted to stay and get lost in.

But my hamstrings warn me I’ve gone as far as I should; it’s time to retrace my steps. Under a small overpass and up the incline my knees had eased down minutes earlier, then around the bend to the apex of the Y, and something steals my breath. Across the river, high above the nuclear power plant, lie the snow-capped mountains that pour this stream its final drink. Clouds hug them where the white fades to purple. They tower above the hills and trees that appear so clear now, and this painting is mine.

The morning of the race started with my usual rice and miso, and countless stretches. I unpacked and repacked my bag, then left early to meet James at the track behind the theater. He, of course, was running the full marathon with one of my six-year-old students’ grandfathers. I stretched and played games resembling hopscotch with my student, who took pictures of me and asked her mother how to say gambatte in English.

I started in the back of the crowd with many foreigners I had never seen, and James moved to the front. Adorned in my black bandana, I looked down the slope of the first half-mile at the flow of Japanese runners. Had I finally become part of the mass? Past outer neighborhoods, where we breathed the salty mist on the road between the sea and watermelon farms, families waved signs and flags. I laughed with one man who cheered, “Go, Gaijin-san!”

We made a U-turn after we reached a large Buddha statue at the top of a hill. It was stoic, steadfast like any statue, but when I stepped closer I saw a relaxed, understated smile. Several gaijin had slowed to a walk by mile seven. Like a year abroad, the beginning of the race flew by and we were apt to marvel at the beauty of our surroundings, bask in the attention we received, and anticipate the surprises ahead. But we were prone to lag through the middle stretch, until we realized the end came too soon.

Countless articles in outdoor fitness magazines describe a euphoric state experienced once a man’s body exceeded its limits ¾ especially if at high altitudes ¾ when he landed on top of the world, where oxygen was precious and everything appeared within reach. At sea level, I slumped under the air, but when I summited the hill behind the floodgate and rounded the corner, the mountain caps over green, red, and yellow trees relieved every pain, every doubt. Since my legs had only ever recorded ten miles, I planned to walk the final three, but when I saw the sign saying there were five kilometers left, my feet refused. Could muscle memory be more stubborn than the mind’s commands? My legs continued their repetitive motion, my lungs burned, and my throat and nose whined. But I glided on.

“Daijobu?” the boy holding the 2K sign asked. Was I okay?

“Hai. Daijobu,” I huffed. Yes. I was okay, I decided, remembering that I was visible, that I was here in this world.

In the final straightaway, tears poured into the sweat trickling from my bandana when I saw James. As if he had spent the last two and a half hours sitting in the bleachers rather than running a marathon, he squirmed into the crowd of cheering friends and ran the last fifty yards with me. I wobbled behind the track, not able to answer him when he asked what I needed. He produced chocolates and oranges, peeling foils and skins so I could load my blood with sugar. “You did it, Kris-tine!” he said. I managed a smile.

A week before the race, I had beamed when Hiro called to say he would be in town that weekend to visit his mother, and hopefully me. All week I tried to concentrate on the race instead of the attention I was sure I’d receive: male attention, the kind I had not allowed myself to miss.

“I’m alive,” I said as I limped toward his table in the coffee shop.

“Yes,” he answered. His eyes scanned my red face, my contracted torso, aching hips, twitching quads. Then upward, to the top of my head. “Your hair is different.”

That afternoon in the coffee shop, as the tea burned my mouth, my throat, and irritated my lungs, he asked me nothing about myself. Six months had passed and all he said was: “I liked your hair better before.” Before, I was the girl for whom he cooked traditional salmon and rice and toured the remote corners of the city he had come to love in his youth. The girl for whom he had described each painting and its creator at the local museum while she raised her eyebrows in amazement. The girl whose fortune he pulled from a vending machine and translated with careful diction, illustrating her future with his own palette.

I had never felt pressure or pain like Hiro had, but observing him showed me something of what lay ahead. How would I reinvent myself at home? All I had escaped was my discomfort: feuding parents, friends to whom I no longer knew how to relate, uncertainty about my future. It was nothing ¾ I had been a victim of my own mind. I wasn’t running from anything in Niigata; I was moving toward a state of mind that made sense for me. Before I exacted discipline on my body, my mind had been intemperate. While I know that avoiding sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and inactivity can make anyone feel better, I am sure now that it was the breathing. As my muscles contracted and relaxed, my lungs sent oxygen into my blood, and my mouth and pores expelled what I no longer needed, my mind did a kind of cleaning out: an exercise in minimalist thinking.

My summertime picture of the Shinano was taken days after the race, as I leaned against the railing with Andras, an Australian teacher at one of the adult schools. It was one of many sayonara picnics before she went home. A six-foot, twenty-something likeness of singer Annie Lennox, she was rarely fazed by the stares she drew.

Poorly framed by a passing stranger, the late summer photo shows us from a long range so that we look small, indifferent, not central to the scene. It includes fragments of other picnics, a bridge, the river, trees, and the sky beyond our reach. Perhaps, I wonder now, is it better than a cheerful close-up, a more truthful portrait of foreign life in Japan?

I remember all the summers of my life as one joyful season. This is inaccurate; it is summer when I feel the most alone, the most disappointed because it’s not the party it was supposed to be. And in Niigata, when I thought of home, the uncertainties there grew smaller as the months passed, as if I had walked backwards away from a painting. Now, when I melt my memories together, ¾ memories of my year in Niigata, ¾ I see mountains above trees that lead out to the sea.

Kristin FitzPatrick is a Detroit area freelance writer, college writing instructor, and graduate of DePaul University’s MA in writing program. Her first job out of college was teaching English conversation in Japan, where she developed a preference for writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Rattawut Lapcharoensap, who illustrate the world of “foreigners.”